Now that he had been away from England for a year or so, many things connected with his home life had grown rather faint amid the daily change and activity of his new life. The rush of fresh impressions had to a great extent overlaid the old ones, and Dorothy and Mr. Cardus and all the old Kesterwick existence and surroundings seemed faint and far away. They were indeed rapidly assuming that unreality which in time the wanderer finds gather round his old associations. He feels that they know him no more; very likely he imagines that they have forgotten him, and so they become like the shades of the dead. It is almost a shock to such an one to come back and find, after an absence of many years, that though he has been living a rapid vigorous life, and storing his time with many acts, good, bad, and indifferent; though he thinks that he has changed so completely, and developed greatly in one direction or another, yet the old spots, the old familiar surroundings, and the old dear faces have changed hardly one whit. They have been living their quiet English life, in which sensation, incident, and excitement are things unfamiliar, and have varied not at all. Most people, as a matter of fact, change very little except in so far as they are influenced by the cyclic variations of their life, the passage from youth to maturity, and from maturity to age, and the attendant modes of thought and action befitting each period. But even then the change is superficial rather than real. What the child is, that the middle-aged person and the old man will be also. The reason of this appears to be sufficiently obvious: the unchanging personality that grows not old, the animating spiritual “ego,” is there, and practically identical at all periods of life. The body, the brain, and the subtler intellect may all vary according to the circumstances, mostly physical, of personal existence; but the effect that the passage of a few years, more or less active or stormy, can produce upon a principle so indestructible, so immeasurably ancient, and the inheritor of so far-reaching a destiny as we believe the individual human soul to be, surely must be small. Already Ernest began to find it something of a labour to indite epistles to people in England, and yet he had the pen of a ready writer. The links that bound them together were fast breaking loose. Eva, and Eva alone, remained clear and real to the vision of his mind. She was always with him; and to her, at any period of his life, he never found difficulty in writing. For, in truth, their very natures were interwoven, and the _rapport_ between them was not produced merely by the pressure of external circumstances, or by the fact of continual contact and mutual attraction arising from physical causes, such as the natural leaning of youth to youth and beauty to beauty.